Nearly a year ago, MyBlogLog was just another way of tracking your blog's stats, boosting your ego by checking where your visitors were coming from and where they were going, their original selling point. I don't know much about their early progress, but after a year they had attracted over 13 thousand users. More recently they posted how 40 thousand sites had signed up and the numbers signing up per day were growing steadily. Then they were bought by Yahoo and continue to pop up all over the blogosphere, but what happened to this little stat tracking site to cause it's popularity to soar recently?

You should be able to see the reason MyBlogLog is growing every day at the bottom of my sidebar. If you are already a member you will know and appear there yourself, as the MyBlogLog Recent Readers widget displays who has read this blog recently. Community based websites like MySpace and FaceBook have prospered unimaginably due to their members' ability to network with each other, but in the world of Wordpress or other hosted blog platforms the premise falls apart somewhat. Bloggers build up a community through comments and commenting on others, but that's it (save for staring endlessly at your own stats on Google Analytics and wondering, or trying to imagine what type of person uses Snarfer as a feed reader whilst browsing Feedburner subscribers).

Bring The Community To The Blog

That's why MyBlogLog's simple idea has impressed me and countless others. Now you, and your readers, can see who else is reading your blog. And you can see what other blogs they are reading, whilst they see what blogs you are reading. And you can become friends. And you can build a community together. And you can see what your community are visiting. And the list goes on...

The Recent Readers widget is a web 2.0 dream come true that puts the power in the hands of bloggers (you can even style it to match your website using CSS, but more on that in a later post). It is the personal element that web 2.0 desires, built on top of blogging's already strong foundation with the addition of being available anywhere. It makes the internet itself the social tool rather than pre-designated social sites like MySpace, and because it offers this freedom it is growing fast. I hope it continues to grow this way as the more people using it, the more I am able to discover who reads my blog and the more blogs I will be able to discover through the people who read my blog.

Anything Else?

Next up is the Co-branded communities which puts even more power into the blogger's hand. It's in alpha testing right now, so I can only stare longingly at TechCrunch's integrated community! Still, it proves there is more to come from an already incredible service.

So sign up and start finding out who is visiting your blog. Drop by and join my community, the more the merrier! Look out for your avatar appearing on other people's blogs in the widget or even next to your comments if they use the MyAvatars plugin. And if you are a member, let me know what you think of the service and where it's going.